Chika Kisada creates fairy-tale clothes straight from the dress-up box that wrestle feminine elegance with tough-girl attitude. A former professional ballet dancer, she’s pretty good at reconciling the two characteristics; this was Kisada’s first Tokyo Fashion Week runway show, but if you judged the collection by its impressive cohesiveness, you’d never have guessed.

A few of the predictable ballet dancer appurtenances were there (swaths of sugary pink tulle, glittering tiaras), but because Kisada’s thing is what she calls “punk ballet,” she also added in bondage-esque harnesses strapped across the chest of floor-length long-sleeved dresses and a slap of leather in a zippy biker jacket. The models were afforded comfy-looking brogues with thick chiffon laces. Hard and soft, playful and serious, childish and adult; this collection was all about the internal conflict one feels when, after longing to be grown-ups when we’re children, we get there and then wonder where all the time went. And so she used nostalgically infantile pinks and blues in gentle fabrics, which were delicately gathered into ruffles or fell down the body in velvety shrouds and contrasted with the gothic black tulle that was worked theatrically into billowy dresses here or textured across a bomber jacket there.